Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Robert
Bales, the American Army Sergeant who went off base and killed 16
Afghan civilians in their homes, including 9 children, and then
burned their bodies, is a disposable cog in a massive military
machine designed for global domination, a willing tool of an
Imperialist power system. Deployed four times into war zones (3 times
in Iraq), separated cumulatively for years from his wife and two
small children, under financial strain, and finally, seeing one of
his comrade's legs blown off a day or two earlier by a mine courtesy
of the ungrateful Afghans, who at a minimum protect by their silence
(sometimes fear-induced) the Taliban trying to kill the Americans, he
finally snapped under the strain put on him. That is, his emotions of
rage overwhelmed his self-control.

Bales
joined the military shortly after the flashy attention-grabbing
9/11/01 Al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. Like many people, his sense of
dedication to his country and people was used against him, to make
him a tool of cynical power-wielders (Bush, Obama, and the entire
gang of apparatchiks constituting the U.S. Government institutional
machinery), a chump, a fool, whose instincts of group loyalty and
willingness to sacrifice for the group made him vulnerable to
exploitation. (1)

One
argument being planted in the U.S. media by anonymous
military/official “sources” is that lots of soldiers have done
multiple tours of “duty” in the war zones and didn't snap. That's
reminiscent of the argument that not all poor people commit crimes,
therefore poverty has nothing to do with crime.

That's
just silly of course. Consider this analogy; parts in machines fail
all the time. Why don't all the parts fail? Because 1) the
parts have a different history of stresses on them, 2) the parts may
look identical outwardly but have subtle differences on a structural
and/or molecular level. People are incredibly complex. When you
subject large numbers of them to stress, it is predictable that some
will “snap” (break) under the stress over time.

The
people calling the shots in the U.S. system are attempting to deflect
blame from themselves for using loyal soldiers as cannon-fodder as
they pursue a hopeless Obama “strategy” of seeking the
unattainable goal of “victory,” or at least “stability” for
the corrupt Karzai kleptocracy. They keep whispering in reporters'
ears that Bales was drunk, and had marital difficulties- assertions
denied by his family's lawyer. Already a battle of dueling narratives
of who Bales is has begun, fought out on the terrain of the U.S.
media. Thus has the trial already begun, in the media.

The
military has a pro forma system of pseudo-mental health
screening in place, purely for show. Military psychologists and
psychiatrists understand, and do, their real job: making sure the
maximum number of personnel are deemed “fit for duty” and
deployed. This is what happens when an Empire can no longer
involumtarily press men into the military to fight its wars for it.
Shortages result.

The
amazing thing is that there aren't more Baleses breaking under the
stress. Mostly U.S. troops are keeping their resentment and hatred
and fury towards the Afghans under sufficient check that it doesn't
manifest itself in murder.

We
must also hold open the possibility that Bales did not act alone,
contrary to the U.S. media depiction of events and its tacit
portrayal of Afghan claims to the contrary as hysterical and
irrational. The U.S. has, throughout its Afghan “campaign,”repeatedly committed war crimes and atrocities, and then lied throughits teeth about them. [Click for examples.] Sometimes it has gotten away with it, sometimes
not. (“Not” means finally being forced to do a limited hangout
and admit to a watered-down version of the truth, “apologize,”
and pay a few bucks to survivors. In one case, of the serial killers
exposed by RollingStone, the soldiers were actually
court-martialed, although not punished appropriately for cold-blooded
murders.) Of course, this is a U.S. military pattern that extends
back to Iraq, Vietnam, the conquest of the Philippines, and numerous
other places. Guess you could call it a “tradition.”

More
and more, the Afghan crusade is becoming reminiscent of Vietnam. A
hopeless attempt by U.S. Imperialists to impose their will on a
small, seemingly weak country, using misguided patriots to do the
dirty work, which inevitably degenerates into atrocities and war
crimes as the war is revealed as a war against the people of the
target country, with feckless, cynical, thieving indigenous “allies”
the U.S. thinks it can prop up as a “Government.” Which it can't.

Once
again, the hubristic American Imperialists (and the two parties are
identical in this regard) think that since they are so powerful, with
a military capable of wreaking such great destruction, that surely
they can impose their will on the situation. They don't seem to learn
the fundamental lessons from experience. Instead they continue to
craft techno pseudo-solutions, as epitomized by fancy
“counterinsurgency doctrines” and fancy weaponry like drones,
using them to commit more murder and mayhem, which thrill then and
fill them with pride. (2)

Make
no mistake, Afghanistan is an awful place, with a horrible,
anti-human, backward culture. Of course, that's thanks to the U.S.,
Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, which prevented the Soviets from dragging
the country kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

Deliberately
letting bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, as the Bush regime
apparently did, set the stage for an endless, futile war. Bush didn't
want to fight it- he immediately turned his attention to settling
scores with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And as long as the U.S.
Imperialists refuse to face the real problem- Pakistan, the
nuclear-armed patron, sponsor, and enabler of the Taliban, which
provides them sanctuary, Afghanistan can be nothing more but an
unhealable wound. And if carpet bombing North Vietnam with B-52s and
fighter-bombers, and invading and/or bombing Laos and Cambodia didn't
solve the “sanctuary problem” in that war, it's laughable for
Obama and his regime to think that a few hundred CIA drone
assassinations will win this war. But the way they keep tacitly
boasting about it with planted articles in the media, that's what
they seem to think. They're delusional.

In
fact, given that Obama is using drone warfare in a number of
countries now, apparently the plan is permanent global assassinations
to try and contain Islamic jihadism. My guess would be it will make
it worse, as the more murders the U.S. commits, the more Muslims
become radicalized and replenish the ranks of the jihadists. It's
rather like the situation in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Bales
has a bit of an unsavory past. In 2000, he was fined for defrauding
a couple in his work as a Wall Street broker. He refused to pay the
fine and was kicked out of the securities industry. (New YorkTimes, 3/20/12.) He also has a record of an assault, which he
was allowed to get away with, and a hit and run accident causing
property damage, also swept under the rug, presumably because he was
needed as a soldier. (Both occurred after he joined the Army.) Being
white no doubt helps too.

In
2009, a CIA drone killed Baitullah Mehsud, head of an Islamofascist
group called Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The upshot? He was
succeeded by an even more vicious terrorist fanatic named Hakimullah
Mehsud. (Mehsud is a Pashtun tribal name.) Now, Baitullah doesn't
deserve having a single tear shed for him. Among his many crimes, he
apparently arranged the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, with the
connivance of then-”President” Pervez Musharraf. (Musharraf was
head of the Pak armed forces who came to power in the traditional
way, via a coup that overthrew the actually-elected civilian
president. For awhile, he affected to call himself “President”
while continuing to be the top general, until, partly due to
external pressure, he figured it would look better- more legit- if
he resigned his military command and just went with “President.”
The U.S. media virtually never mentioned how the loathsome and
extremely mendacious Musharraf came to power, so as to not embarrass
him. They, like the U.S. Government, were invested in shoring up
Musharraf's faux
legitimacy just as Musharraf himself was.) Bottom line, the U.S.
won't defeat this malign ideology via decapitation, no more than
killing the President of the United States, or the CIA Director, or
Secretary of “Defense,” or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, would call the collapse of the U.S. Government or military or
secret police. It's not like when the CIA murdered Martin Luther
King, Jr, and Robert Kennedy, which ended political movements. Maybe
that spoiled them.

Or
it could be force of habit, as the CIA's stock in trade is preparing
death lists and arranging

killings.
That's what they did all over Latin America, and in Vietnam (the
Phoenix program), and

even
in places most Americans would be surprised to learn about, like
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where they helped him exterminate communists.
But that was when he was a “friend.” Oh, the CIA also fingered
Nelson Mandela for capture by the South African apartheid racist
regime- that cost Mandela 25 years in prison- but at least he lived,
unlike literally millions of other people the CIA has helped arrange
to be killed or killed directly.

Friday, March 16, 2012

The Establishment media is all agog over medieval sex
repressor Rick Santorum’s Great Victory in the darkest backwaters of the U.S.,
Mississippi and Alabama. He won- with one third of the primary votes in 4-way
contests. A whole 308,000 primitives
voted for him in the two states. See? That proves America's a far right wing country!

In fact, as the numbers below show, Santorum, Romney, and
Gingrich each got about a third of the votes in both redneck states.
Functionally it was a three-way tie. But the media distorted the result to
present it as a smashing victory for Santorum. Just about every newspaper and
broadcast outlet ran with the same false narrative.* (There might as well be a
Bureau Of Propaganda in the U.S., giving order, so slavishly conformist to
their group distortion are the media in this case. The “coverage” could hardly
be more uniform.) And speaking of distorting reality, indeed of creating a
false reality to confuse people about actual reality, the corporate media
insist on pretending Romney is a “moderate.” As a description of his political,
ideological, and economic positions, he can only appear “moderate” from an
extreme reactionary perspective.

And once again a tiny sliver of the U.S. population, a group
of extreme right wing religious fundamentalists, (pretty racist too- you never
see a single black face in all the photos of the GOP’s Southern rallies) is
given the task of acting as gatekeeper for who can be the candidate of one of
the only two parties that is allowed to meaningfully exist in the U.S. Thus are
all normal people forced to vote for whatever slimy con man the awful
Democratic Party happens to cough up. It’s a political extortion racket,
forcing people to vote for the lesser of two evils.

The neofascist Wall
Street Journal was pleased and offered Santorum free advice in an editorial
on how to advance his candidacy.

By the way, the two corporate-oligarchic parties don’t
assign delegates to states based on population. They “reward” “loyal” states
(states that vote for their party’s candidate in the general election) with
extra (“bonus”) delegates. So the backward redneck state of Alabama has the
same number of delegates (50) at the GOP convention as New Jersey, which has
almost twice “‘Bama’s” population. Mississippi
gets more delegates than Maryland,
again with half the actual population.

Georgia is smaller in population than Ohio but has more
delegates at the GOP convention. Nevada has about four times as many actual
people living in it as North Dakota, but gets the same number of Republican delegates. Plus even the tiniest states get a minimum of
10 delegates.

Yet another mechanism for skewing politics in the U.S. as
far to the right as they can.

*One typical example: His victories are “big news,” says
Michelle Martin on NPR, where she has her very own show, Tell Me More. Of course the rest of the corporate media treated the
Santorum “victory” as the top story of the day.